Mardi Gras Parade and Street Fair

On the Sunday before Fat Tuesday, Nevada City closes North Pine Street from about 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Broad Street from noon to four. The street fair opens on North Pine at noon. For 2026 the Chamber of Commerce’s listing also placed it on Commercial Street. About a dozen jury-selected vendors set up there. In 2026 they included Solstice, selling masks, wigs and hats for a Mardi Gras outfit, along with sellers of hot dogs, Mexican food and handmade gifts, eco-vendors, and area nonprofits. Beads are for sale for anyone who arrives without them. The Chamber, which runs the day, asks everyone to come in costume.

Floats down Broad Street

The parade steps off at two o’clock from the top of Broad Street at Cottage Street. It works downhill and ends in front of the Chamber offices on Union Alley. For the 2026 parade on February 15, Chamber executive director Lynn Skrukrud counted about 30 floats from local organizations and individuals. Elisa Henderson Parker served as emcee, and The Union reported that New Orleans-style beads would be “thrown and strewn throughout.” Before and after the procession, the Earles of Newtown, a New Orleans-style jazz-funk band, play from the balcony at the corner of Broad and Pine, above the Nevada City Chocolate Shoppe.

The entries change from year to year. In 2023 the Chamber listed the Merry Widow Society, the Con-nec-tion DANCE Project, the Huldufolk Icelandic Elves, marching bands, and a pony. SFGate in 2022 named the Mystic Order of the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Undertakers, and Emma’s Good Time Girls. It also described a Southern-style brass band second-lining while “General Doo Dah” tossed beads, and Elvis look-alikes in the crowd. Stewart Baker, then the Chamber’s executive director, listed “convertibles and other folks like the old fire truck and a fire-breathing dragon made out of old iron from nearby farms.”

Riding with them is a court of four. Each year the Mardi Gras Planning Committee names a King, a Queen, a Grand Duke and a Grand Duchess, chosen for what they have done for the town. In 2023 the King and Queen were Adam Kline, newly elected to the city council and front man of the local band Golden Shoulders, and Anne Han. The Duchess was Cindy Giardina, known as “Mama G” of the Gold Era Cocktail Bar & Lounge. That same year the parade fell on the same weekend as the South Yuba River Citizens League’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival for the first time. The parade took the festival’s theme, “CommUnity,” and the two shared a street fair on North Pine.

Nevada City was once, during the Gold Rush, the third-largest city in California after San Francisco and Sacramento. SFGate puts its population now at about 3,000. The Chamber and SFGate both call its parade the largest Mardi Gras on the West Coast. It is held rain or shine, “at least in theory,” The Union wrote in 2026, when the forecast for parade day was a high of 54 with rain likely. Snowstorms have closed it a couple of times. “It’s really family friendly,” Skrukrud said that year, “and I think in this time where there’s kind of a lot of negativity in our world, it’s a place where we can all go and kind of just escape from that negativity.”

A bartender on Commercial Street

Until 2003 the parade went by another name: Joe Cain Day. By SFGate’s account it began haphazardly in 1996. David “Sparky” Parker, later the town’s mayor, was tending bar on Commercial Street. His friend Kurt Colagross had recently moved to town after retiring from the Berkeley Fire Department, and he came in talking about a trip to Mobile, Alabama. Mobile had reminded him of Nevada City: Victorian-era houses, faded brick, narrow streets laid out for horses and carriages. While there he had seen Joe Cain Day, a Mardi Gras custom kept only in Mobile.

The Union names the bar as Wiley’s and tells it through Rick Ewald, another founding member. Parker shared the idea with Ewald, and Ewald recalls him saying, “Well, why don’t we do that?” In Ewald’s telling, the first year the celebrants gathered in the bar and spilled out onto Commercial Street. The second year they walked the sidewalk. The third year the city agreed to block off the street. SFGate gives a different date for that step. Beside a photograph of the 1996 procession down Broad Street, it says that year was the first time Joe Cain Day was an officially sanctioned parade.

Mary Ann Crabb, who chaired the parade, remembered 1996 as the big one. “I helped put together the biggest parade they ever had back in 1996,” she told SFGate. “We had a limit of 49 entries because we are forty-niners and because of the Gold Rush. It took a lot of cajoling and phone calls but we made it happen.” Parker’s Joe Cain Society and Crabb’s Merry Widows ran it together. Both were loosely modeled on the members-only krewes that plan Mardi Gras in New Orleans. “There wasn’t any big plan behind it all, we just tried it out,” Parker said. “It felt like a very Nevada City kind of thing to do.”

Joe Cain, and the change of name

As the story goes in Mobile, the city had kept Mardi Gras since 1703, and the Civil War ended it. In 1866 Joe Cain, a Confederate veteran who had once lived in New Orleans, revived it as a protest against the Union occupation. SFGate reports that he dressed as a chieftain of the Chickasaw, a nearby tribe said to have held off Union attacks. He then rode the streets in a coal wagon with other veterans, banging pans and drinking liquor. SFGate calls the history murky, and insensitive both in its celebration of the Confederacy and in its portrayal of Native people. Ewald’s version runs: “Joe Cain was a womanizer, and he was sympathetic to the southern states and Civil War. He would dress up as a woman and parade through town, or he’d dress up as an Indian.” Asked about the Confederate roots, Crabb said, “I have always stayed very far away from that.”

The crowds grew quickly, and the drinking grew with them. At one point the organizers had to ask the San Francisco Police Department for steel barriers. “It became pretty rowdy and the direction needed to change because it was a bit too alcohol-fueled, so it went from Joe Cain Day to Mardi Gras,” Baker said. Parker granted that the early years were “very fun” but lacked the municipal support that would make the day suitable for families. In 2003 the Chamber took the parade over and dropped Joe Cain’s name. It has run nearly every year since, except for the snowstorms and the COVID-19 shutdown of 2021. “This has turned out to be the biggest one-day entertainment in town,” Parker said. “The bars have their biggest financial day.”

Mobile has since noticed. Kendra Day, an executive producer at WKRG 5 there, had assumed the Merry Widows were “the only Mobile thing nobody else has.” In February 2026 she interviewed Ewald and Parker for a feature that aired on Fat Tuesday. “Oh they called us,” Ewald said. “They called the Chamber of Commerce and (the Chamber) said, oh we don’t know; call Rick.”

Twelve widows in black

The Merry Widows outlasted the name change. In Mobile, the story holds that twelve women came in mourning to Cain’s grave on the day he was buried, all of them lovers or wives. Ewald adds that the widows would sometimes play croquet on the grave. In Nevada City, twelve women dress somberly in black and take personas such as “Candy Cain.” They twirl and sashay at the head of a procession of hundreds. SFGate describes the society as closed, with only twelve members at a time, and says 45 people had belonged since its start in 1993. Parker says the Widows have given scholarships to college students since their first year.

Crabb founded the society and led it as head widow. In 2022, at 70, she told SFGate after the canceled 2021 parade: “We’re hungry for those good times again, baby.” Later, as she grew frail, the parade gave her a float to ride. “It always was a marching society,” Ewald said. “So in 2024 she came up to Ricky and said, I want young blood. Will you take this over?” His son Ricky did, and since her death he has led the Widows down Broad Street.